Preparing students and families to thrive in the gene age

Impact of the Human Genome Project, James Watson

Description:

Interviewee: James Watson.
James Watson talks about impact of the Human Genome Project.

Transcript:

We're going to see all the human genes, and we never thought we were going to, you know, be able to read the book once we had it, but now we have the book and I'm beginning to know how to read it. And it'll sort of define the proteins and the RNA's that do the work of the cell and then of course you have this gigantic task of saying how 40,000 different actors interact over, say, 70 years, it's a big job. But of course when we started we knew that none of our instruction books are perfect, and often these imperfections lead to quite serious diseases, and to understand the diseases you really have to understand what went wrong in the instruction book. So from the beginning it was really imperfections in the instruction book seemed as important as the perfections.